Law and disorder

Sir Stephen Sedley read English at Cambridge and Lord Dyson Classics at Oxford. Both switched to law and achieved high judicial office, the former a senior Lord Justice of Appeal, the latter as Master of the Rolls. Both were effective advocates as well as admired judges (not always the case). Both clearly enjoyed these two distinct stages in their legal careers (again not always the case).

These volumes are not judicial memoirs (though each contain fragments of autobiography), but compendia of the author’s views on a variety of legal issues, notably the appropriate distribution of governmental power in British society. The recently retired president of the Supreme Court wrote: ‘Yesterday’s judges were children of the conventional and respectful 1940s and 1950s, whereas today’s judges are children of the questioning and sceptical 1960s and 1970s.’ By this test both authors are in harmony with their times.

Both emphatically reject the notion that judges are out of touch. Both emerge too as firm defenders of the judicial faith against critics who accuse them of trespassing on pastures properly reserved for politicians. In giving full effect to constitutional and human rights sourced in the laws of the European Union and European Convention on Human Rights, they see themselves not as enemies of the people but as friends of the people.

They note, correctly, that it was Parliament which incorporated those laws into the national legal system. But this defence is partial, not complete. Judges are not automata; they have and make choices. Dyson crosses swords with Lord Hoffman over the role of the Strasbourg Court which the former regards as providing benign guidance, the latter as guilty of overreach. Sedley takes aim at Lord Sumption, another aficionado of judicial self-restraint, in the public law sphere.